Meritocracy again, but with the rich and poor

Listen I know I ride on this meritocracy thing a lot, but once you read the book your whole world gets shaped by it. Michael Young was a damn visionary and I cannot understand why his work doesn't get more coverage. Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World offered similar warnings about propaganda, group think and genetic screening for your place in life, but Youngs warning about how they will come for us and swallow us under with education and testing is the warning that has actually manifested to a real threat to our freedom to live our lives.

This video is about experiments that observe the attitudes and behaviors of rich and poor people. These same behaviors are described and manifest in The Rise of the Meritocracy, towards the end where the meritorious assign more and more of the rewards to themselves and less and less to the dullards until they rise up violently. If you haven't read the book do yourself a favor and do, it's short possible a day or two worth of reading and it's amazingly informative.

Meritocracy impostor syndrome

I'm dredging up the Meritocracy business so put on your big kid pants and get ready for some more thought provoking crap. In this particular installment I thought I would cover a topic that was brought up somewhat passingly in Round 4 of the Rise of the Meritocracy, the impostor syndrome, well summarized here in comic form.

In short you feel as though you are not as good as people have come to believe you are, and are certain that everyone will realize that you are not as skilled as you've led them to believe. A perennial favorite time waster of mine Lifehacker posted an article about how this sensation may actually be a good sign of both your competence and your intelligence.  In Rise of the Meritocracy the gifted members had no reason to doubt themselves or the spoils that they got for being better than others, every step of the way they had to prove and reprove themselves to take what they got. In effect the constant testing created a vanity and entitlement that prevented the Meritorious from really evaluating if they where in fact as smart and worthy as they believed themselves to be.

Sound familiar? I'm sure people of both political spectrums would be quick to point at one another, but I think we can find plenty of examples in business, education as well as in government.  In some ways you could almost point to the entirety of your country... but I'll leave that for bar room discussions.

Another Meritocracy Article

This one comes from the ever respectable Economist Magazine and boy son I am dissapoint.

The author grasped at one of the points Michal Young was making, and tripped over a different one.  The money conflating quote

As for the rich strivers, there is nothing that you can, or should, do to stop people investing in their children, but you can prevent them from unfairly adding to their already privileged position. For instance, standardised tests were supposed to favour the brainy, but the $4.5 billion test-prep industry, which disproportionately caters to the rich, indicates that this is being gamed. Intelligence tests should be more widely used.

Bold added to highlight the real whiff.  Young's dystopia was largely centered around standardized intelligence testing.  Intelligence testing as a means for determining ones worth was exactly the dystopia Young was rallying against. The author of this article may well be forgiven for not knowing what would be a perfect solution as Young doesn't offer one, rather gives warning that focusing on intelligence will only be tolerated in society for so long before outright rebellion.  No model for the future is offered here, but Young clearly believes that humans deserve to have the ability to pursue what makes them happy, even if it doesn't advance the nation as a whole.

So in closing, way to misunderstand the source material.

More Meritocracy

Twilight of the Elites

It was an interesting read, but it would be nearly impossible to summarize. It draws from many threads of history to try and weave a narrative of the decline of American institutions and the trust of people in those institutions and then link that to the increasing inequality we are observing in our society. It's a tall order, and I think he does a decent job of building the case that our fundamental posture in the US of distrusting authority, and authority continually doing things to cause us to distrust them is undermining our ability to even approach issues with common understandings. The more forward looking ending piece is hopeful, but nothing more. He thinks that a radicalized upper middle class of well educated people that are not getting the opportunities that are increasingly being accrued by the top percentage of elites will form the core of a body that works to topple the status quo. 

Again hopeful, and overly optimistic without much of a chart forward. See occupy movements for how much good optimism and faith in people will get you, mostly some brutality and some annoyed people that otherwise might have supported you.  If you stuck with me through the Rise of the Meritocracy and are interested in this type of thinking Twilight of the Elites[?] is a good follow up from the American perspective.  Hayes mostly uses the meritocracy as a canvas to paint the American struggle on so while having read Young's book did make the terms Hayes used more concrete and added weight to his argument, Rise of the Meritocracy isn't a prerequisite for reading Twilight of the Elites.

Interview doesn't add much gravity to the book, interesting to put a face to the author I suppose.  I did expect him to be a little older.



The National has a fairly long excerpt from the book at this link or if you want a very digested version that lacks some of the emotional punch of the book The Daily Beast has that here.

Progress and such

I'm about halfway finished reading Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy[?] which was always the next book on my list after Rise of the Meritocracy. It is so well written. It flows like a running narrative, but woven in there is a critique of America building to a final point. I hope that he has some excellent recommendations for alternative models, but the picture he's painting is spot on and has a great eye for history.

If you've read Rise of the Meritocracy and think that Young's warning should be payed warning, Twilight of the Elites is Christopher Hayes ringing the alarm bells and shouting.  Even if you're not an American, it's a pretty fascinating look inside of the body politic of America and how we came to feel like a bloated and rotting corpse in just 236 or so years.

In unrelated news I'm gonna get my beer brewing on this weekend, so I can get something in that beautiful and sadly empty oak barrel!  It will remain sadly empty for about 2 more weeks while the beer finishes fermenting to be ready for the barrel.  The style is going to be American Strong and the hops I plan on using are Cascade but that is about all I've managed to make my mind up on.  I'm waffling back and forth about using extract and sugar to bump the OG up, or just tough it out and try for higher efficiencies with the all grain.

I also started a batch of sauerkraut 2 days ago, that should be ready to eat in a few more days.  It's a pretty simple recipe and pretty traditional, but I needed to do something for the fall.  If I'm still feeling frisky I've got my sourdough that needs some attention this weekend.  In all it will be a busy long weekend!

Venture Capitalism is a "Meritocracy"

Catchy headline no?  Well this is a semi-sidebar on the whole "Rise of the Meritocracy" series that came up in May.  I noted it and am noting it now mostly to point out that the notion of meritocracy is a concept embraced in the modern world and still in the vernacular of popular culture.  In this particular instance it carries a more insidious undertone related to sexism and to a lesser degree racism.  The particular article was on Techcrunch after a Partner at a Venture Capital firm filed a sexual harassment suit.  The firm itself is well regarded as a pioneer in gender equality as it was the first to have female partners in the US, and has multiple funds managed by female partners.  It was shocking in that no one expected it of a firm considered progressive.

The author has a slant, but it is interesting that the panel was comprised of all men and only one had the stones to take on the question of sexism in the industry.  Of further concern is that the one man that did answer from the all white male panel dismissed the notion that there was sexism because venture capitalism was a meritocracy.  Nope nothing to see here, that woman's claims are without merit.

So sidebar it may be, but here you have gender politics and privilege wrapped up in a word coined just after the second world war.

Meritocracy Round 6

Continuing from Round 1, Round 2, Round 3, Round 4, and Round 5 so begins the Chapter 7 summary.  This chapter begins with a bold declaration that Classes and Castes are universal (Natural Order perhaps?), and the level of harmony between them in dependent on the distribution of resources according to the moral code.  In this instance the author indicates that something in 2005 stabilized and the harmony had been stable since, as long as you don't count the discontent that this whole book is about I guess.  In essence when inheritance was wiped out you had to compete via merit for a high paying job, the poor no longer took offense to those that had more, they had earned it after all.

The socialist begrudgingly tolerated the elitist attitudes because for instance they as well as everyone else wanted the best care they could get when they where ill.  What they bemoaned was the pay gap, keeping in mind Young has cast the Socialists as believing everyone is equally deserving of everything.  The hard part for stability was choosing a mandate to decide the relative fairness on, as there where many perspectives on the issue.  The silencing of this debate was key to stability, and was achieved with the 2005 equalization of income act, so that everyone gets the same pay.  I think Young was jumbled on his thoughts here or more specifically he failed to carry his solution to the logical finish when he wrote it.  In any event he continues on as if everyone got the same pay, and said the difference in incomes for the elite comes from employer provided services (maids, secretaries, home, cars, ect.).  He justifies this system where the government is the ultimate wage payer so profits go to the government  by saying that wealth generated must be reinvested to stay competitive with other countries in the future.

What should have been a marvel of having the whole country on the same pay grade is instead called a hypocrisy, the elites are more rich than previous elites because of this facade.  The trouble ultimately begins with when it's a battle of wits to determine the distribution of assets the new low class has the deck stacked against them.  In earlier parts of this chapter he talks about different pay grades inside of companies so I felt Young lost his way a bit on this chapter, or at least didn't clearly delineate that the pay grade discussion was for pre-2005 companies.  In any event I think the rest of the book you are supposed to believe that in terms of money everyone gets payed the same, but that the elites get cool free stuff as a part of their having a job.  Surprisingly I think that this type of a system would be more fair than our current set of elites that often don't "work" any more.  They have so much money that they live off of investments, or other people working.  If they wouldn't have the benefit of fancy cars and nice houses without having a job, you would see a very different attitude towards the rich.

In chapter 8 we really finally get to the meat of this book and look at the present day, life under the meritocracy.  The author notes that the Meritocracy isn't perfect, but rather a balance, and believes that until sociology develops as much as the other sciences there will never be a frictionless society.  Even with that in mind the resistance to the meritocracy doesn't make sense to the author so he explores where the spark for the resistance came from.  It started with women he thinks, that went to work as lower grade labor rather than in their earned place.  The tried to convince their fellows of the injustice that was being rained on them.  Sadly there was no common will to raise up as these intellectuals where "day tripping" as laborers and didn't know the technicians hearts.  They did however plant a seed to encourage smart people to stay as technicians rather than pursue advanced education they where entitled to, that their intelligence would be available for their fellows.  An intellectual education counterculture if you will, and a grassroots movement grew up from there.  They never had a good idea for how to go about it as most that could advance wanted to.  The tact that found purchase was to argue that physical labor had was as valuable as intellectual labor that can be satisfying by it's own right (There are seeds of this in our current society see Zen and Motorcycle Maintenance, or the results of this search).  They where questioning how we came to ascribe one person more value than another one?  And argued the ability to expand production made sense when war was eminent but couldn't we broaden the definition of value?  The resistance group produced the 2009 Chelsea manifesto claiming the aim of the group was to cultivate variety, that felt that the inequality reflected a narrowness of values.  In a reversal of what the meritocracy had built they called for a return to common schools to cultivate an appreciation for diversity and to nurture the children's contentment.  Arguing that people should be free to pursue the things they are truly great at, and able to enjoy the full spectrum of human experience.

So who where these women that worked with the lower class laborers?  Young titles this section the modern feminist movement, and from here it gets interesting.  Some of the women mentioned didn't marry and settle down, rather continued in their quest to overthrow the Meritocracy (those evil women!).  The reasoning as to why the did this the author believes is related to the biological role, and how the women are supposed to stop work for some time to raise their children as that is considered the noblest job (likely buy the men of the meritocracy).  During this time they transfer their frustration with not being able to have true biological equality with men to the authority figure of the state and fight for equality they can win (or so the author believes).  He does concede that the meritocracy is still asymmetrically benefiting men more than women which does add to their reasons to protest the status quo.  Another rallying point is the practice of marrying for intelligence, as the insurrection favors romance and beauty.

Perhaps spurred by the resistance, the meritocracy has moved in legislature to have have the hereditary nature of intelligence guarded with guaranteed education for their children, in essence undoing the whole meritocracy's advancements.  The story sort of takes a swerve here into the silly in my opinion, but in the fictional future social scientists developed methods for reliably testing intelligence by knowing the intelligence of the parents, as if intelligence is set by your genes.  With the evidence that their children where in fact superior, what was the point of equality of opportunity?  The outcomes where set there was no need to bother placating the dumb of the society.  The author notes that the truly bright tend to have slightly less bright children and the truly dull have slightly less dull children and thus trend towards average, but that the extremists of the new conservatism didn't care, while the more moderate offered a compromise of a limited window for rechecking.  The final straw, that started outright resistance and the events that where outlined at the beginning of the book was the practice of kidnapping promising babies for the elite to raise as their own and shipping of their dumb offspring to be raised elsewhere.

Though they where the move by the conservatives to restore heredity after it took two centuries to tear it down was met with revulsion as it was an attack on the values of society as a whole, so even if the New Feminists also represented an assault on some of the core of the Meritocracy it upheld equality of opportunity and for that is perceived as more moral.  Without the antagonism of the conservatives, the women's movement would have had no support.  Though they capitalized on the conservatives actions as well as they could, the movement was merely riding the mob, not guiding it.  I disagree with that assertion that there would have been no support as the structural inequality of the meritocracy probably would enough to garner some support, even if it wasn't as much as they received with an enemy to the common man.

The response in the Parliament was to remove the most far right elements from power, and promise not to do the most offensive things they had suggested, leaving the author to believe that the rebellion was defanged.  He died at a rally in Peterloo where he thought the rebellion would fall apart without a common enemy.

There is a footnote at the end that is quite telling and sums up better than I can hope to.

Since the author of this essay was himself killed at Peterloo, the publishers regret that they were not able to submit to him the proofs of his manuscript, for the corrections he might have wished to make before publication.  The text, even in this last section, has been left exactly as he wrote it.  The failings of sociology are as illuminating as its successes.

So ends The Rise of the Meritocracy, and more thoughts to come!

Meritocracy Round 5

Continuing from Round 1, Round 2, Round 3, and Round 4 picking up with the Fall of the Labour Movement.  The Labour Movements historic role in the book was to win the people's mind to the order of the world the other reforms had created, to adapt to the language of the people the message that they need to compete and be measured.  That this was their will being done.   The end goal to equality of opportunity was aided by the Socialists having related or similar enough goals that gave them reason to add their support.  Once opportunity was equal the secondary goal of the socialists, equality of man was absurd.  Had the ideal of equality of man been carried to it's logical conclusion, the revolution would have been a dud.  The will to rise as high as your abilities justified had to be the ethos of the people, Young's literary doppelganger says otherwise the the country would never have achieved it's many successes.

While discipline was voluntary, socialism played an indispensable role in goading people to go get the opportunities available to them.  Where Protestantism fired the acquisitive urge it had to be adapted to economic requirements in order for expansion into Western Europe and other parts the world that made up the British Empire, the older religions of the rest of the world to provide that fire.  This gave rise to the linked religions of Communism and Nationalism and the accompanying revolutions that helped the Russian, Chinese and Arab's be receptive to needing turbo generators and electrostatic wands (author's examples not mine, you could say cell phones and televisions just as easily).  Protestantism could only go so far though as it encouraged the hording of wealth for future generations, so it was the transmutation of Protestantism through non-conformist churches into anglo-socalism that carried the transformation the rest of the way through.  It was the socialist distilled message that all men where created equal, so what did right did one man have to opportunity that all other men didn't have as well.  They failed to see that in practice that equal opportunity was real equal opportunity to be unequal.  Their structural blindness helped them attack with vigor all means of inequality due to inheritance.  Death duties, the decay of nepotism, free secondary and university education and the integration of public (again in America we call these private) schools, wages for students and the abolition of the hereditary house of Lords (British house of government) where their greatest achievements.  A change of the countries psychology on the scale and time frame it was achieved wouldn't have been possible without the socialists.

The next section is on British politics, and is not the most interesting read for those that don't know how their government works.  The short version is this outlines how the House of Lords came to be a tool of the Meritocracy and the House of Commons came to be of little importance.  Prior to the casteless society suffrage (the right to vote) was recognition that intelligence was distributed among the population at random, so the above average in the miners and factory workers was likely to be as intelligent as the above average Lord.  Once the society moved to a class based society the argument that talented could be plucked from among those that where left after intelligence testing had separated them out of was harder to make.  The lower class clung to their right to vote, even as it made them inherently less and less equipped to perform in the complicated government that emerged from the rise of the meritocracy.  Even though that could be demonstrated, the public continued to elect from within, and the author concedes that there are rare occasions that advice from a properly advised common man is as good as what the meritocracy can come up with on it's own so the social relief of allowing the appearance of power sharing is worth headache.  The real reform came in the House of Lords.  Hereditary peers where banned, the membership was restricted to life peers, the selection was of men as well as women from the most eminent people in the Kingdom and the payment of a generous honorarium transitioned the tool of the Aristocracy into a tool of the Meritocracy.  Further lessening the role of the House of Commons was the high preference given to selection for the civil service, that is filled with highly competent and well trained servants.  In the face of this, nearly all amateur politicians are happy to take the glory and abandon the power.

With it's purpose fulfilled the Labour party continued on mostly because of social inertia.  The members of the party advanced their concerns as unit when the individuals where bared from advancement, once the meritocracy began to work there was no need to continue to work together.  Their compromise with the society that they helped to birth was to cease to exist.  Every individual advancement was a detriment to the Labour parties whole.  There was some political appeal to claiming labour heritage, the hard upbringing and working one's way up the ladder, but as the base of the party advanced to middle class there was less value in those emotional appeals.  Interesting to note in this section Young guessed at something that really has come to pass years after he parodied it.  He proposed upgrading of titles to jobs that could not be upgraded otherwise.  Workers became Technicians, Technicians became Specialists, Specialists became Benefactors, ect.  I would have to look it up, but I thought this trend started in the 80's, but can you imagine rat-catchers as rodent officers?  This behavior was also mimicked by the unions, and thus the labor party became the technicians party nearly overnight.

As the meritocracy kept the bright for itself there where no up and coming intelligent children in the labor force of the unions to replace the retiring union leadership.  Unions would have collapsed under mismanagement had they not changed tack and taken to strengthening their appointed staff by hiring from universities.  The negotiation shifted from with individual companies to nationalized negotiations based on statistics rather than bargaining.  It seems absurd to anyone that has ever dealt with a union that nationalized bargaining would ever have a chance of being less contemptuous than the union bargaining we read about in the news all the time.  If State's can barely make peace with just the Teachers Unions, I cannot imagine what waste workers or longshoremen would be like if they negotiated with the Federal Government.  I'll give him some creative license here, I'm positive that the author hoped humans would be more capable of being civil in the future and went when he was writing this.  As this history lesson draws to a close, the author does finally start to peal back some potential reasons that there is unrest in the Meritocracy.  He notes that modern populists are arguing that because their leadership didn't ascend from their ranks, their is no cohesion.  The group cannot look up to one of their own that has succeeded, in essence hope has vanished.

Continue to Part 6 >>>

Meritocracy Round 4

Continuing fromRound 1, Round 2, and Round 3 we pick up on Part 2 of the book: Decline of the Lower Class.  This section sets up a review the consequences of  progress for the lower class; declaring that before the Meritocracy took over, while socialism was working to chip away the value of being born wealthy there was a golden age of equality.  Some people advanced on their own merit, and others on the tails of their family but this whirligig ensured the powerful where always unseated.  The chaos of the system gave the lower class the illusion they had been given opportunity to do something different with their life.  It gave life to the dreams they never lived.

In that age, there was benefit to mixing of class as the intelligent upperclass had much in common with the intelligent lowerclass, when merit put only the unintelligent into the lower class the riff was greater.  The people that achieved success had not reason to doubt themselves as they had claimed this prize as a result of  their merit.  Without the impostor syndrome effect and humble beginnings to temper the meritorious people's perspective they saw less and less reason to approach dealings with the lower class in an altruistic fashion.  The author notes it as more of a public relations matter, thinking that it was a matter that training could clear up.  The meritocracy created a system where we where the unmeritorious only had themselves to blame for their status, causing them to loose faith in degrade further (reinforcing negative sentiments).  The situation was not as bad as it could have been because of 5 reasons.  First, the lower class had a mythos of honoring  strength (athleticism) the way the upper class honors honored smarts, that gave the lower class some (limited) ways to achieve some form of recognition.  Second, the adult education center and mental heath treatment gave people a way to bloom later in life (either because of intelligence coming to them later, or being a better thinker as they work through their mental health issues). Third, parents could take solace in the fact that their children (or grandchildren) could through their own merit achieve great things (Transference?), and Fourth they were blessed to be to ignorant to realize how bad their lot in life really was.  The fifth and most important reason was the implementation of meritocracy in industry.  It draws on lessons from WWII that found grouping people with other of similar intelligence improved their morale because they felt they where competing on equal footing for promotions and perceived themselves to have a more fair chance.  The army found that people could be taught more readily and would get along better with people of their own intelligence (or lack there of).

There was some question of what to do with people rated as just smarter than rocks, as the socialists fought against giving them the worst and least desirable jobs.  They argued about the dignity of the worker, but the author dismisses this as "pre-merit" thinking.  He argues that after inheritance was displaced that the notion of equality of man was show a farce.  Men are most notable for their inequality of endowment!  What is the purpose of abolishing inequalities in nature but to expose and pronounce the inequalities of nature?  Young continues on that each according to their ability, no more no more made the whole of society more satisfied (failing to note that it also is causing the uprisings).  He says that without science studying human relationships resentment for declining status would have boiled over long before.  In essence if it had been too uncomfortable it wouldn't have been tolerated, so the lower classes complacency was always a part of their lowering.  Automation in the 60's was an excellent way to view the systematic trouble of the meritocracy.  As machines grew ever more complex, more was demanded of those that built, serviced or designed them and less of those that operated them until the operators  where displaced permanently.  The advances in testing helped to identify what employers where just carrying some employees.  The high churn was because some of the employees where unable to produce labor of any kind due to their lack intelligence, testing helped identify how poor of employee's they actually where.

This lead to a new kind of unemployment, people where deemed essentially useless and no one knew what to do with them.  This gave rise to a proposal to begin training the poorly equipped to take over the menial tasks of their betters (grocery shopping, cleaning, ect.).  It gave the truly unintelligent something to do, and the Home Help corps laid down guidelines for how domestic servants would work and be paid to prevent a return to slavery.  The value to the meritocracy here was doubly realized by the women.  meritorious women whom upon marriage still took on much of the household labor, and unmeritorious women that make up the bulk of the Home Help corps.   Th author notes that the merit based selection system made for a stable, though intricately balanced society.  Believing it to be permanent would be a folly.

I realize I'm already getting pretty long on this summary, but there are only 3 more chapters and Michael Young had a lot of things to say in his short little book.  I took 19 pages of notes and only have 5 more pages left to go, so I'm hoping that I can wrap this up here relatively quickly in 2-3 more posts.  Bear with me here, there are a fair number of articles and related thoughts to draw in once I get done with the summary.

Continue to Part 5 >>>

Meritocracy Round 3

Continuing from Round 1 and Round 2, right into chapter 4 which deals with private industry and the transition from seniority to merit based advancement.  Because age is as inefficient a measurement of worth as what class you are born of the "class" of old men had to be by passed or the meritocracy would have been another gerontocracy.  The result was a blend of the best of the American model and British education meritocracy model , competition for life.  Prior to WWII the lure of a steady paycheck would pluck students away from education into industry but an unnamed act in 1944 (I assume mandatory primary education or something similar) started to slow the flow of able minded from school to industry.  This forced industry to recruit from grammar school and university.  The author bats away the notion that people trained in a specific industry would be better capable of running the businesses than generally educated students with no industry experience (I can think of several instances of this being proved decidedly wrong already).  Because the competition for the best talent was leading to some abuses the government stepped in and began allocating talent to industry as it suited the national agenda.  Essentially pouring brains from the school "factory" into the industries that the government wanted to grow.  This put the government in total control of industry and the economy (the potential for and probable actual occurrence of abuse should this type of a system ever be implemented are so obvious I hope it would deter the building of such a system).

While the advancement of merit in the schools was releatively smooth, in industry seniority was more deeply ingrained and harder to route.  The deference to older people was (somewhat literally) beaten into school children by larger and older children and stayed with them for life.  The socialist movement that supplanted the legitimacy of inheritance was also working against rule by the old, but it proceeded rather piecemeal with individual old men being dethroned rather than all at once.  This was likely due to the age war being less cut and dry than the wealthy vs poor as some on both sides of the age divide where not true to their own interests.  Particularly so where those that had to change jobs; they didn't want to have to start over as an apprentice so they argued for merit based placement.  A major stumbling block for the seniority system was the set retirement date, if someone wanted to advance someone else had to retire for the rung on the ladder to open up, and people that stayed on past retirement delayed the advancement of many people below them.  It was those people that didn't want to retire that argued for merit as a way to judge that their abilities had not declined so far as to necessitate they leave.  One of the reasons it was so difficult was the ease with which it could be measured, and Unions favored it because injustice was simple to spot.  This argument fell by the wayside as more effective methods of measuring merit where developed as well as increased transparency of the merit scores to remedy the mistrust.  It was because you could go down to the central testing facilities and look up the scores of your peers you where assured that they had the position they deserved.

As this is the final Chapter in part one the author summarizes his points really exceptionally well,  and sets up the second half of the book that will examine why it may be that the less educated are rising up against the meritocracy by looking at the social structure that the Meritocracy has created.  He warns that though the few of the lower class are exceptional, as a mass they are formidable.  In particular Young identifies two types of people that form the lower class.  The majority being the unintelligent children of unintelligent people, and the minority being the stupid children of brilliant people.  For the latter group Young points out that they where born into luxury, and unable to attain it for themselves.  In ages gone by their parents could have heaped resources on them to make sure that they maintained some of the comforts of their childhood, but the discontent of having to live poorly after knowing such highs must be particularly acute.  Given that they are almost universally inarticulate it's no wonder that they support the (fictional) revolt that has given them a voice where before they had none.

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Meritocracy round 2

Continuing on from Round 1 in chapter 3 the author continues to examine how Britain moved from the social order of the late 1950's to the (fictional) present 2030.  He left off on how socialism's advances where resisted in most quarters due to the nature of the British notion that not everyone is equal.  This initial step allowed testing to seperate the bright from the dull, and the brilliant from the bright.  The evolution was important, but it was lacking in full efficacy.  There was still the opportunity cost of staying in school vs going into industry to begin earning a living.  Some people made that choice and the chances where they where likely to be bright people from humble beginnings, leaving to support a family or other outside interests.  To capture the value of these intelligent people, the early supporters of the meritocracy started to implement a form of stipend for the students.  It was payed directly to the children (not their parents) as a means of keeping them in school rather than moving to industry.  The author sees this as a natural extension of the "scholarships" that Universities paid people attending.  He gets into a strange aside about reverse egalitarianism about how some children of semi-wealthy parents didn't attend University because they weren't eligible for scholarships, and would have to pay the full fair.  I feel it's a stretch in logic, and ignores the fundamental difference of using those scholarships for paying the tuition but whatever.  That they would pay students seems baffling, but I think the author found it to be a cart and horse kind of thing in that if the students are leaving you are not getting the benefit of those educated minds, more over he covers the student stipend before the pay increases and prestige of teachers.  In a knowledge society, it seems that it would go without saying that the teachers would have to be better respected and payed to draw them from other competitive fields.

The author apparently thought keeping children in school was more important than having something good for them to do while they where their (hence my horse and cart reference), but never the less we carry on.  In the fictional near future from the book's authorship (1970's) government comes to realize that it isn't getting increasing returns from piling money into specialized schools when the students that could attend, or should attend where not well prepared for those higher educations.  This realization of wasted opportunity was important in driving additional funding into all steps of the primary education from 3 onward.  The government also recognized the irony of the fact they where spending  as much as 3x's as much on "bad" students rather than using those resources honing the willing and capable students.  Segregating intelligent from the less so helped to ensure that the resources could be doled out more effectively, and didn't leave teachers to wrangle the truly disruptive elements of the classroom.

The next section requires a huge cultural subnote as the words are about to get confusing.  In Britain "Public schools" are actually private institutions, and "State schools" are actually what Americans would consider public.  Keep that in mind as you read, but also that increased pay for teachers, and stipends for children all where transpiring in parallel to this.  While socialist where making their play for universal education the middle class (and several high earning socialist) responded by sending their kids to Public Schools even though it was financially burdensome.  The thinking was selfish, but a product of the parental urge of wanting only the best for one's children.  As the socialist moved to try to close this escape loop, they found they lacked the political capital forbid parents from spending money on their own children and instead moved to prevent generational abuse, and raised capital levies.  Capital levies prevented the creation of new fortunes, and generational abuse was when a Grandparent would finance a grandchild's education rather than pay that money to death taxes.  These to moves put the squeeze on Public schools, and gave the government more money to distribute to the State schools.  Another factor that started to bring the Public schools to heel with regards to honoring merit was the relative declining quality of their attendies.  By honoring legacy instead of strictly choosing the most capable, they found the quality of their students dropped at the same time their teachers where being lured away to the now (comparably) better paying State Schools.  The declining prestige was enough for the most pragmatic schools to adopt the meritocracy rather than face extinction, and in doing so keep some measure of their prestige.  The double punch of money and prestige was enough to get the majority of the other Public schools to phase out legacy consideration all together.  The severing of the loyalty of kinship was further driven home by the extensive participation in school and clubs (as well as the school stipend).  Parents lost some of their ability to effectively influence their children, and they where mercenary in pursuing their own best interests.

On testing.  What a waste it would have been to create a avenue to reward the most promising students, and set aside spaces in the best institutions if there where no way to identify those deserving few?  This required advancements in the fields of intelligence testing over the simple testing started in WWII with such great effect.  The progress on these fronts was slowed by socialist agendas, and thorny metaphysical questions (equal in god's eyes, but not Psychologists).  In trying to understand our intelligence we set out to replicate it (which is a hugely interesting forward looking thought on Artificial Intelligence) and by 1989 in the book had created computers against which we could baseline intelligence against.  The research identified that intelligence was affected by your physical social environment so offering therapy became a standard perk for workers, as they might be more valuable if they could get over whatever hangups they had.  The nature of a single test at 13 determining your fate for life was wasteful, so adult education centers that allowed for re-testing where a beacon of hope for the late bloomers (portal fans try not to chuckle in this section when they start talking about continual testing of adults).  The retesting is a main point of contention for the populist movement, it shows that intelligence is in a state of flux.  Because retesting was a method of upward mobility closing the adult education center (covered much later in the book) may have been the tipping point for the (fictional) current upheaval, where the leaders of the movement are the bright, but not brilliant that hoped for a better life with retesting.

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Meritocracy round 1

So I hope this will be a broad overview of the content of the book Rise of the Meritocracy.  If you are going to read it and don't want any spoilers well now would be a good time to stop reading because I have every intention of talking about all the bits contained in this book.  That said, I do think people should read it as I've said before, because it is an interesting snapshot from an interesting period of time.  The reason that you've heard of Huxley, Orwell, Viktor Frankl, and dozens more is the era they lived through cast a very long shadow on mankind and the things that where also happening around the globe where great cause for concern.  Michael Young wrote to tell of a different type of dystopia.  In his world the idea of equal opportunity had been carried to it's logical extremes, and an unbiased measuring stick was being used in Britain to determine the haves and have nots of the future society.  The trouble was very real, and will ring true with people in the current #Occupy movement but that's for later.  For now the actual what Michael said in his book.

The most obvious and top level thing to point out here is that the book was written very specifically about Britain, and it's particular place in the world.  The author was genuinely concerned that his country would take the lessons of the great war, and try to model society after that.  His concern was not unfounded given the amazing sway socialism had over such a large part of the world during and following WWII.  The major role model countries during the time where Russia, and America and as such the author references them often as the extremes that Britain was somewhere in between.  He modeled out how the country would transition from it's current (1960)  model of a mimicked Aristocracy to socialist ideals, and finally to a Meritocracy where the most intelligent and most driven ran the country and reaped great benefits for doing so, while the rest filled posts suited to their lack of ability.

The introduction serves as setup for the book that follows but ultimately you are trying to understand a fictional series of future events that occur in 2033.  The author list names and dates, talks about various ideological factions that are semi-impenetrable, and honestly made me want to stop reading.  If you've ever tried to read naked lunch you will know what I'm talking about.  It really takes a few pages of things that for the most part you can dismiss as nonsense before we get to the point.  The author suggests that all the events that he has been talking about are a result of the social order of Britain and offers to compare the present (2034) situation with the time period of 1914-1968 in Britain's history in order for the reader to better understand the "populist movement".

The first chapter covers a broad range of motivators for the Meritocracy, and introduces the term as a successor the previous social orders of Oligarcy and Plutocracy a nuanced replacement following the inheritance model of a Monarchy.  Numerous times in the chapter he references how the Meritocracy is really the final evolution of Socialism, and given how socialism is interpreted in the United States I have a hard time not taking these as false complements used to criticize the model further.  It's hard to de-contextualize this so this bias is worth noting.  The overall history lesson was somewhat interesting in the way the author covered the good aspects of the inheritance model (by staying put, people really had to practice stewardship of the land they worked for instance).  Ultimately though the second son (and third for that matter) found themselves the have nots as a matter of birth and the first a have for nothing other than calendar date of birth, this lead to chaffing in the family unit and caused the other children to strike out to make a better lot.  Even as the country transitioned away from inheritance, it was determined that family was the best way to raise good people (flies in the face of Huxley's model no?) but their influence had to be muted so as to insure only the best carried on to complete educations.  It was what was best for the country, and it was needed to stave off the clever foreigner.

The clever foreigner is used as a specter to strike fear in the hearts of the British that would rather their dull children reaped the education better suited to the people that could compete for the country the best.  The fear of being eclipsed by another country was a strong motivator, but ultimately the families undoing was socialism.  Socialists sought in various ways to ensure that children of poor households had the opportunities of wealthy ones, and lobbied successfully for inheritance taxes and death taxes to prevent parents from passing wealth unfairly to their children or grandchildren.  These contributed greatly, but the socialists largest contribution was the push for better education.  The masses rallied around the cause to improve their collective lot at the expense of the most privileged.  A society based on merit was the will of the people.

Chapter 2 covers an interesting transition where the will of the people seems to have been usurped by the clever few, and how socialist ideals of equality where usurped by testing and merit.  Some people where more equal than others,intelligence was the yardstick rather than wealth or the family you where born into.  It effectively replaced one unfair system with a new one, and the author suggests that it's the nature of people to not really believe that people are truly equal.  This bias helped but socialist didn't go quietly into the dark.  They tried to introduce comprehensive schools modeled after American High Schools, the flaw in this the author notes in in America you have equal opportunity for education but you have to compete once you graduate (to get a job, or make a living ect)  Britain didn't have the same history of private enterprise that encouraged competition, instead they choose to compete in school via intelligence tests to pick the winners earlier and earlier.  Russia was mentioned as not having a private industry to separate the wheat from the chaff, but the very high standards of Russian Universities made sure that the primary education was rigorous and forced students to compete for entry.  Ultimately the urge to get the best education for their children caused the socialist movement to be divided in itself as supporters undermined themselves by not choosing the integrated schools they proposed as an alternative to the of open primary, and testing to get into secondary.

Well, call this the end of the first post as it's getting a touch long and I'm getting distracted.  I'm about a third done with my notes so there should only be three posts on what the book actually said, but keep in mind I'm skipping a ton of the content.

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Finished

I finally managed to get through that last bit of The Rise of the Meritocracy.  I was somewhat pleasantly surprised by the last pages and also sad by the implications.

I'm working on getting it all parsed out, and I have several current topics that are related to Venture Capitalism, and Feminism that are relevant to work on future blog posts for, but the first one will probably be just a broad summary of the book and what he wrote, vs how the word Meritocracy has come to be used in the current world conversation.  I think Michael Young was a pretty talented writer in the way that he laid out a path for transitioning from our current power system to a Meritocracy in very clear language, without being dull.  It may have helped that he had touchstones from the 1940's and 50's as jump off points and then got to make up the rest of what happened between then and 2030, but the way he wrote was really the standout.

Meritocracy is becoming my Everest

I'm getting close to finishing this frigging book, and I'm super excited to get down to working on the take-aways and parallels in modern society.  I hope to have some solid interesting ideas on how this is playing out all around us and show the brilliance of this book.  Here's the thing I think that the author truly believed that implementing a meritocracy was a dangerous and short sighted road for the future, but unless he comes out a says it quickly I think he underestimated the potential for abuse in this system.  As he has written it, this system was born out of egalitarian motives, advanced with pure intentions and implemented with great fairness.  Any of that sound like something that would happen on this planet?  Right, Marx envisioned something similar with his communist manifesto (I have read it so shut up, but it was a while ago so bear with me) and really thought that with the right intentions we could have a better planet.  The rise of the meritocracy is more of a retrospective warning of what would happen had someone written a Meritocratic manifesto and it was implemented in Britain.  I think there is a chance I have my notes on reading the Communist manifesto somewhere or another, so it may make an appearance here (if for nothing than that the socialists where mentioned time and time again in this work).

Why do I mention it?  Well for the last few weeks I've dedicated the time I would otherwise spend to write posts here to reading that book outside in the sunshine (such as we manage to get here in the Pacific Northwest).  I'm down to about 40 pages remaining and really excited about the progress I'm making.  One strange benefit of dragging out reading this book is that it's been on the top of my mind when I'm reading other things on the internet and has made for some interesting connections.  I don't plan on making it a monolithic post thus far, it's just too much to try and cover but here's the thing I think everyone should read this book.  Skip the parts that don't make sense, ignore the bits about British government if they don't mean anything to you and don't try to figure out if any of his predictions came true.  Read it for the structure, and reasoned force of making a point.  It is some large part fiction extrapolated out from history with sociology mixed in for the seasoning, and some of the best writing in terms of clarity I've ever come across.  This books sets up his points delivers, and then summarizes without repeating himself.  I know that is how you're supposed to write, but I have to date never encountered a better example of it that didn't feel forced.  It's a story, and it flows but it's presented like a school paper with structure and grammar to match the substance.  Whether fiction or dry theory the author has great command of language, writing with a common voice without being common.

That's really hard to do.

More on the Meritocracy

So I posted about this in M last month and have since purchased the book and am working on finishing it.  I'm taking notes as I go and here is why sometimes it takes me a really long time to write posts.  These are my notes.

For chapter 1.  I'm on page 46 of a 200ish page book.  FML.